In the midst of my reaquaintance with the Desktop PC I finally had a chance last night to sit down in front of the demo for Star Wars: The Force Unleashed for Xbox 360.

It's nice to have a Star Wars game that actually makes me want to play it, and STFU's short demo gave me everything I wanted in my force-using dreams, with powers that genuinely look and feel powerful, smooth controls and plenty of things to smash. It's interesting how quickly my brain went from the mind set of 'Oh, look, here come five enemies for me to kill' to 'Oh, look, there's a clump of enemies for me to deal with.' What I mean by that is the game rewards wholesale destruction rather than concentrating on the finer points, so you end up looking around your environment looking for things that can help you deal with the next wave of rebels in as efficient and destructive a way as possible. That, to me, seems pretty smart as well as making you feel ultra-powerful.

So I'm having a pretty good time, slashing and blasting my way through corridors and along ledges and finally along a long stretch of bridge. Everything seems to be reaching a climax, when in front of my eyes one of those big two-legged walker guys rises up in front of my eyes and I'm very excited to do battle... unfortunately this is where the experience unravelled a bit.

Firstly, I couldn't understand why I couldn't use my force pulling powers on the guy's legs when I'd just been throwing much larger stuff around with gay abandon. Or rather, I could understand why - the game wanted to have a more interesting fight for me. However, the game had also spent 20 minutes training me to throw about anything that looked like it might be throwable and there was nothing to immediately suggest to me that the legs might be any different until I realised that I couldn't target them. Because I'm wasting valuable seconds trying to move something that can't be thrown, the thing was all over me.

This might seem like nitpicking, but it's actually worrying. When I've just been throwing TIE Fighters at people's faces and yet when the game wants to put me up against something bigger, suddenly my powers aren't as effective as they were just a minute ago - that's backwards. It should be harder because the enemy is much more powerful, not because my powers have inexplicably been made less effective. These sorts of battles should simply be making me use my powers more creatively, rather than stopping them from being useful.

It gets worse. I chucked a couple of explosives at his head and spent a few seconds wiggling my lightsaber around the thing, when suddenly the camera changes, and there's a little symbol crossed out seeming to tell me I've done something wrong. It kicks me back to normal view and then after a few seconds the same thing happens again and I realise that it's one of those stupid semi-interactive press-the-button-at-the-right-time-to- make-the-animation-go quick-time events. Let me get one thing straight. A game with moves as cool as this should not need to interrupt the already-impressive choreography with pre-animated sequences. There has to be a better way to do this. Modify the standard fighting animations to do certain special things specific to this particular type of enemy/battle, perhaps. Anything to keep me playing instead of watching. Worse still, it gives you absolutely no warning that this is about to happen, so it took me several tries to anticipate it coming so that I could akwardly stop mashing buttons when the quick-time event might be about to start. If you accidentally press one wrong button when the event suddenly begins then it fails you out, so it seems to require some sort of telepathy on the part of the player.

What a disappointment. However, STFU is exactly the sort of game I find reviews useful for. If I get the feeling that there's going to be a lot more silly decisions and inconsistencies like what I just described in here this simply isn't a buy for me no matter how fun the rest of the gameplay was. On the other hand, if I can be convinced that the game opens out a bit more and doesn't squander too many opportunities for me to feel cool without pre-animated assistance, I could well be picking it up.